Learn what a business model looks like to innovate print communication

Learn how to benefit from high quality ink-jet technology innovations

Learn how to become a smart communicator in the field of print applications

The meeting this morning with Mr. Koning was my first ever client meeting, and it was certainly fascinating. Mr. Weber had already briefed Şükran and I on the product and business model that Mr. Koning is trying to promote here in Germany. The idea is simple, yet brilliant: personalized printed cards, advent calendars, playing cards, wine bottle boxes… the list goes on. The products can be printed on a special new printer model created by the Japanese company Screen. It is an inkjet printer which can print onto thick paper that already has cut patterns and markings on it. It saves a lot a time and work because the paper is pre cut, and usually the paper is printed and then cut, which can be impractical, as if there is a mistake in the cutter the whole product can go to waste.

The product not only works on a personal scale, but could also work brilliantly as a customer relations model for big companies, for example in the automotive industry. If they’ve sold a car, they can send the customer an advent calendar counting down the days until they receive their car with a picture of their new car and their name on it. The best part is, they can even put bar codes (which can be scanned by smartphones) into the doors which lead the customer to links informing them on extra products for their cars, for example, winter tires, navigation systems, tow links etc. which would certainly not only increase the profit margin but keep the dealers happy as well. Mr. Koning put it quite nicely, calling it a win/win/win situation: the customers, the dealers and the company are all happy.

The meeting was very interesting for me, as I had never experienced a client meeting and I was curious to learn what a business model looks like. Mr. Koning is a very charismatic person and he knows exactly how to present his product. The problem he is having in Germany is mainly with the printing companies, because they don’t like the idea of only printing a few copies of a product, rather than printing thousands of copies; that’s what Value Communications is going to help him with. Additionally, the printing companies charge per page rather than per product, so for them it makes no sense to only print 1 page per product, but the page itself guarantees far more revenue in this case, as it is sold as a product rather than a page. As well as this, all the other companies he has talked to up until now have loved the idea of the product, but they are simply afraid of the work it would mean for them, i.e. the data processing etc.

I also think the idea is exceptional; if I were a customer, I would definitely be happy with receiving something like the advent calendar whilst waiting for my product to be delivered.

Koning is in the printing and marketing sector for a long time. He mentions that several years ago when he started to promote Photobook, he received very low expectations from those big companies in the printing sector: People will not use Photobooks.

As Koning also highlights by giving this example, people tend to disbelief such products and new ideas when they do not have enough information. Therefore, we need smart approaches to showcase new ideas and products in order to create the right impact on people and to convince them that these products are very useful.

The products Koning already introduced us were very catchy and practical. When you reach the website www.snapajack.com, you can choose from diffetent options of printable products as gifts, calenders and invitation cards. For instance, there is a printed calender which you can use as gifts to modify your car. On the printed sheet, you have screens covering chocolate bars and on the backside of each screen you have QR codes which provides you to have your product to renovate your car. These are accessories like a sound system, winter tires, or a new GPS.

Not only calenders, but also you can have personalized invitation cards, wine or beer boxes, playing cards or widely-sized greeting cards on printed sheets. This innovative approach also provides you to have many cards on one sheet. Koning as a smart communicator and innovator is very well awared that personalization becomes more and more important these days and all of printed products he shared with us provides customers to personalize everything. Especially, playing cards drew our attention during our ValueTalk as the product is very suitable to showcase paintings of artists and screensheets are available to keep 55 cards which is very easy and smart to scan it.

Our Take

At the end of our ValueTalk! with business developer Wim Koning about his ‘very high valued application‘, we found his innovative ideas highly interesting and useful which are also closely linked with our business approach in which we value healthy customer relationship, personalization and innovative ideas as well as human-to-business approach with Win-Win-Win principle. We have the pleasure as we met and discussed with Wim Koning on his innovative applications and as a good speaker who knows the real value of communication!

ValueLearnings:
• IoT is crucial for any kind of Business Model Innovation
• IoT will increase profit and growth via Value Creation and Value Capture• IoT follows the rules of Value Innovation by the Big 5-C approach

By Şükran Ceren Salalı, Value Art&Communication Fellow

Gordon Hui, who leads the business design & strategy practice at Smart Design in United States and England, just published a blog post called How the Internet of Things Changes Business Modelsconcerning with the relationship between the Internet of Things and existing business models.

According to Hui, today`s business model innovation is hugely affected by the Internet of Things (IoT) which includes value creation and value capture which are two main points for companies in order to increase their profits.

Value creation plays an important role to provide activities for companies in order to increase their offering and to support customer willingness to pay as a main business model. Moreover, value capture provides strategies that help companies to maximize their profits from discrete product sales by setting the right price which means also the monetization of customer value.

Real-time and Over-the-Air updates

The changes that based on value creation and value capture can be counted in many steps related with the traditional product mindset. Through value creation, addressing real-time and emergent news in a predictive manner rather than in a reactive manner, benefiting from over-the-air updates instead of focusing solely the product itself, and also using information convergence more than using single point data help companies to adapt the right business strategies for a healthier customer relationship and better profits. When it comes to value capture, enabling recurring revenue, adding personalization and context and also understanding how other business partners make money encourage companies to maximize their profits.

Hui also quotes Zach Supalla`s, the CEO of Spark (an open source IoT platform), words; “With the IoT, you can’t think of a company in a vacuum. The market stack is deeper than traditional products; you need to think about how your company will monetize your product and how your product will allow others to generate and collect value, too.” In other words, Supalla draws attention to the point that the value of IoT is huge enough to connect profits from different products each other.

ValueAdvice: Connect Innovation to Profit

What Andreas Weber suggests in How to Survive the Innovation Dilemma is a principle called `the Big 5-C´ that contains content, connectivity, consumers & brands, community and creativity. The Value Innovation strategy also contains the function of IoT by highlighting the importance of connectivity and consumer&brands, which are exactly serve for the same mission to create value in business strategies in order to support customer willingness and maximize company profits.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++

In Brief: What does „Internet of Things (IoT)“ mean?

The Internet of Things (IoT, also Cloud of Things or CoT) includes objects, animals or people are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.

The Internet of Things can be a person with a heart monitor implant, a farm animal with a biochip transponder, an automobile that has built-in sensors to alert the driver when tire pressure is low — or any other natural or man-made object that can be assigned an IP address and provided with the ability to transfer data over a network.

The Internet of Things has been most closely associated with machine-to-machine (M2M) communication in manufacturing and power, oil and gas utilities, also enabling advanced applications like a Smart Grid.

I always enjoy interacting with new people from various countries with different perspectives. After doing my AFS Exchange Program in Belgium and participating in an international peace project in the Netherlands, I said “why not to apply the Erasmus internship program which gives an opportunity to work in different countries for 3 months”. In the beginning, it took me a long time to decide which city to choose, however; while I was doing my research, I have heard many positive comments about the life here in Mainz. After a process of finding a right place for my internship, I am accepted in Value Communication AG, a global research and publishing company gives a high value to art, culture and communication and based in Mainz where I started to work as Value Art + Communication Fellow.

When I arrived in Mainz as a Sociology student and as an Erasmus intern from Istanbul, I got inspired and fascinated by the rich cultural and artistic environment of the city as the hometown of Johannes Gutenberg and the surrounding area as a leading centre of the culture of communication. Based on my inspiration, I decided to experience this city in order to find out the interaction between the rich culture of the city and the real value of communication. Also, I had this great support and useful advices from Andreas Weber, who is an expert on communication and the founder of Value Communication AG. That´s how our Value Art and Com (i.e. Communication) project is brought into action.

As one of my project areas, I visited an exhibition, Kunst Direkt 2014, which took place in Rheingoldhalle, at one of the beautiful spots of Mainz situated near the river, Rhein. In the exhibition, there were 120 talented artists from Rheinland-Pfalz state of Germany. The exhibition was consisted of different rooms in which each artist could present her/his artwork. I found this event as a wonderful opportunity to start my interviews for our Value Art&Com Project. There, I interviewed with 10 artists, some of them were painters while others were sculptors. The most important thing is that, by these interviews, I had the chance to know what artists as talented people think about the real value of communication. I had different approaches by each of their responses which gave our project an artistic touch and various points of view. As a person who is very well interested in art, media and cinema, It was a very special process for me and for our disruptive project.

Pls. watch as well our Slideshare presentation which includes all those fantastic videos (Series 1).

Prof. Joi Ito, the (creative) Director of MIT Media Lab, made a fascinating speech which was presented at an official TED Conference. Thanks to Prof. Ito, Business Innovation process got one of its best explanations. During his talk, Ito drew attention to various facts about the transformation of internet as an innovative business tool in today’s world based on his own experiences and many examples.

He started with talking about the times when to get MBA was very important and also the time we do not have internet, what Ito calls it as “Before Internet” (BI), people mostly hired MBA’s, spent a lot of money and created their products and services. Nowadays, it is possible to create such new businesses and to get connections in a different, fast and more cost efficient way. Prof. Ito showed how the do it in China, where they don’t demo new products on websites and PPT charts, they just deploy it on-the-fly.

“Traditional rules of institutions do not work anymore”

In a good sense of humor, Ito also criticized the education system we are in. According to him, education is what people do to you and learning is what you do to yourself. One of our favorite parts of his talk is when he said is what you need to learn is how to learn.

In the age of working with machines which are able to do the same work that is done by many workers in a factory, innovation is, as Prof. Ito remarked, democratic, chaotic, and hard to control. Therefore, traditional rules of institutions do not work anymore.

Taking the no-more-practical traditional rules into consideration, Prof. Ito highlighted various different principles in order to benefit from transformation and innovation in a better way. For instance, he gave “power of pull” as an idea of pulling resources from the network as you need them rather than stocking them in the center and controlling everything. It sounds very practical and smart in order to catch the spirit of innovation.

“Key to success: being connected, always learning”

In the end of this charming and smart speech, Prof. Ito summarized what he wanted to say by these excellent sentences:
“… even though the world is extremely complex, what you need to do is very simple. I think it’s about stopping this notion that you need to plan everything, you need to stock everything, and you need to be so prepared, and focus on being connected, always learning, fully aware, and super present. — So I don’t like the word ‘futurist’. I think we should be ‘now-ists’, like we are right now.”

Our Take: Thank you for leading us to think from this wonderful perspective, dear Prof. Joi Ito!
What we have been trying to explain so far via our blog posts regarding ValueCheck! and how it works is very well fits the talk of Prof. Joi Ito. In the age of digital transformation, getting rid of analogue ways of thinking and trying to be more present “at the moment” with a high attention to our relations with other humans and the environment we live in are very important age to adapt new trends of business life. Let’s give it a try… ValueCheck! helps you to catch the spirit of becoming now-ists!

NOTE: ValueCheck! delivers recently the most comprehensive and effective way to update your business management&communication knowledge. Our Focus: Identify relevant topics to be discussed, put them into the right context and be able to create your own opinion and expertise.

Why its worth reading this Blog post:

• Summary of the most relevant ValueCheck! Blog post• Train your Brain on-the-fly• Get a very useful access to update your knowledge via ValueLinks and ValueTips

In other words, human side of business transformation should be taken more into consideration as the age of digital transformation puts consumer in the center. This is why Value Communication keeps focusing on using digital technologies based on H2H and a disruptive approach to understand the relationship between technologies and consumer behavior.

ValueCheck! emphasizes the relationship between H2H aspects and the use of digital technologies while analyzing consumer behavior and the company’s approach.

What we at Value Communication aim by „ValueCheck!“is to help business people to become far more successful in their sectors. By answering the questions of „ValueCheck! Audits“, a company can become aware of its abilities and inadequacies in a more detailed way. The important thing is we treat our customers as (best) friends.

Our ValueCheck! method equals to friendly attitude towards our customers and a detailed way to guide them to see their capabilities.

We proudly present: World’s first Train Your Brain Fitness Check-up to be ready for profitable growth in “The Age of the Customer”!We are happy and proud to share some thoughts. Based in Johannes Gutenberg‘s hometown, Mainz/Germany, we are dedicated to the rich culture of Art = Innovation = Communication = Human-to-Human!

Value Communication analyses and supports approaches of customers to H2H aspects and then finds the best method to guide them on track of becoming a successful and profit-making companies.

But nevertheless we live in a digital world. Social Media and all our Social Activities will never be able to create relatedness. It enables connections. That’s it! — Kill stupidity in business driven by executives who still use their analog thinking in a digital world.

Our message according to all activities based on our disruptive Value Task:
Just do it the smart way. Unify Social & Human-to-Human. ValueCheck! has a disruptive approach that combines advisory, publishing and community.

Disruptive innovation is not a threat as it would be perceived by the university management of Harvard Business School based on last debates about whether entering to the business of online education or not. What makes innovation disruptive is the way it makes a product, a service or an idea remarkable with an unusual approach to renew our consumption patterns and lifestyles.

Since ValueCheck! contains a disruptive strategy, it checks H2H and B2B aspects with an unusual way to renew the company strategies.

It is apparent that those B2B service companies require important innovation and transformation in order to satisfy the expectations of their potential customers. Therefore, the importance of „ValueCheck! Audits“are apparent as a solution to check the weaknesses of businesses in Social Selling and Social Businesses. „ValueCheck!“questions include many related topics so as to strengthen the strategies of companies.

Even many successful companies fail to satisfy customers. ValueCheck Audits provides better perspective to see what is missing on track of keeping good connections with the market and customers.

I think, in the age of digital transformation, education needs to get some disruptive innovation as well. Maybe, we can call it “digital education”. Digital Education allows many applicants around the world to benefit from online education platforms via several tools such as iPhone, iPad and other portable instruments. Considering all of these, I am pretty surprised that how as one of the top ranked and most successful universities, Harvard Business School, has a dilemma about entering online education.

ValueCheck! follows the latest trends in order to guide companies in the best way so as to adapt itself and its customers to the age of digital transformation.

In the future it is more about Interaction & H2H and less about Designers…

The core meaning of the tweet is design matters, nevertheless; it is not solely enough to become very successful. Besides design, key enablers of PARC include other systems such as intelligent manufacturing, model-based reasoning, integrated planning and control, and printed electronics. Moreover, without effective human-to-human interaction and innovative approaches to satisfy customer, a superior design only leads to empty promises, or let’s say “all fur coat and no knickers”!

ValueCheck! emphasizes human-to-human interaction and innovative approaches that guide companies for a better strategy to adapt in future technologies and the market system.

In the age of digital transformation, it is a big mistake to limit advertising and marketing based only on printing like we already know it. There are many platforms and social networks to work on in order to advertise a product or a system by drawing attentions. The age of the so called „digital transformation“ needs better rethinking over analogue approaches in order to satisfy consumer needs in a best way.

ValueCheck! also focuses on the importance of social networks and various platforms in order to catch the spirit of the age of digital transformation and distribute it to companies as applicants of ValueCheck! Audits.

PARC is a Xerox company which provides custom R&D services, technology, expertise and intellectual property to various global companies, startups, and government agencies. Pioneering many technology platforms in cutting-edge technology and enabling the creation of many industries, PARC creates new business opportunities, increases internal capabilities, quickens time to market and decreases risk for clients.

Manufacturing is affected by digital technologies that enables lowers cost and lower volumes for various products. For that reason, there are several shifts in how products are developed, made and transmitted to retailers and consumers. Accordingly, the new arising system includes social design and social funding. PARC aims to create more broaden and unified visual design and produces hardware, software, and process technologies. Not only technological provision, but also innovative approaches are executed by PARC specialists so as to build public-private partnerships.

Recently, what The Twitter account of PARC (PARC, a Xerox co.) tweeted a quite interesting post:

“Design can get you up the hill but not to the top – pivots come when teams start reacting to user input #PARCForum @IITDesign @jnd1er”

Our Take:In the future it is more about Interaction & H2H and less about Designers…

The core meaning of the tweet is design matters, nevertheless; it is not solely enough to become very successful. Besides design, key enablers of PARC include other systems such as intelligent manufacturing, model-based reasoning, integrated planning and control, and printed electronics. Moreover, without effective human-to-human interaction and innovative approaches to satisfy customer, a superior design only leads to empty promises, or let’s say “all fur coat and no knickers”!

Note: What a pity. They offered a video live stream during the event on July 1st, 2014. But not afterwards. And we didn’t found al lot of Tweets about it on Twitter. So even the innovators at PARC could improve in valuable communications!